Questions regarding flash

Hi!
Im pretty new to the apple world.
I've used windows for 8 years and just switched to mac.
I was wondering if it was possible to program and design a game in flash using AS3 and then somehow "convert/switch" that someting you can you use with Xcode and all the good stuff that comes with iphone SDK.

I thought I read somewhere that this was possible? but not widely used as flash is more in the web development area.

If not i'll just have to stick with the info i've collected: ObjC (which I really hate and would prefer something else but i'm assuming it is the language I need to learn to program games for the iphone), openGL ES (still VERY confused about this), openAL (this is like openGL but for sound, right?), and Xcode.

There's no magic convert/switch technique between flash and iPhone. ... well, at least not as far as I've ever heard, but I'd be pretty effing impressed if there is one! I just spent the last three months converting flash design demos to iPhone, so I'd like to see a good implementation of something like that.

My advice is: Don't hate Objective-C. That's like hating C#. Really not a good mind-set to be in on the Mac, any more than hating C# would be on Windows. You can complain about the funky brackets all day long, but the fact and reality is that it's a great programming language.

OpenAL has nothing to do with OpenGL. They're not anything at all alike (well, maybe just a teeny-weeny bit), even though that seems to be the intention of OpenAL.

Yes, those look like the steps you'll need to take, although you won't need to master ObjC -- an afternoon's worth of it is probably enough to get by on iPhone if you're mainly doing OpenGL game programming. You just need enough ObjC to access a few important system API calls. C is most important and must be learned first (then tack on some ObjC), and OpenGL has a notoriously steep learning curve which you can get into after you've learned C.

The main disadvantage to CoreAnimation is that it can't perform as well as OpenGL when you want to get into more intensive stuff, which means that with all the time you spend learning CoreAnimation you could just as well learn OpenGL in the first place. Otherwise, yeah, it can be used for basic games. I've tested it myself so I know it's capable of handling at least basic games, although I didn't push it to its limits. Two nice advantages to CoreAnimation is that it takes care of all the timing and tweening for you.

I haven't actually seen Tetris on iPhone so I can't say whether it's 2D or 3D (or even 2.5D).